UX is Design – UX Collective

I keep reading articles and seeing online conversations saying that UX is not Design; this rhetorical statement is very shallow. We also create experiences, yes, we do. We, designers, create and design experiences, and when we do, we are suggesting users to do something and we are persuading them to take a path: a path that is designed. Sure, we are not designing their behavior but we are designing the space for them to behave, mostly in an expected way: we are anticipating a user to behave in a way so he/she reads, clicks, buys, watches, sees, looks, enjoys, plays, fills, captures, comments, listens, requests, grades, asks, reserves, learns, swipes, navigates, discovers, entertains, and in many other ways interacts with what you or a team has created. Yes, a user might choose to not do something when he/she doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to do so, but also a user might not know he/she is supposed to do something, but then we are talking about usability whether it’s failing or being effective at its goal.

Design is not just creating User Interfaces and all the visual design, designing is more than that; it is planning, understanding, analyzing, researching, strategizing, creating, storytelling, solving, visualizing, iterating, validating, measuring, prototyping, and testing amongst others. If you do only a fraction or part of the process you might not feel like you’re designing, but you are; it means your output is part of the process, therefore, you are designing. Obviously, this statement about “designing” has a fine line where doing only research and nothing else can be seen as not designing at all, but this is only true when you don’t know what the research is for and who is it for, and this might be rare or useless.

Stating “UX is not Design” is a short phrase, but a harmless one that only confuses us and our clients.